


brother, we fall

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Human, Birthday Presents, Brothers, Gen, Sibling Incest, Underage Sex, birthday kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 22:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17569424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Thor waits until he is sure his brother is gone before he sneaks over to his dresser. There, in middle of all the other pretty rocks is a tiny, teardrop shaped clear stone. It’s cut through with a reflective gold and a chalky black, and Thor remembers seeing it for $8.95 in one of those weird crystal shops.Loki must have saved up a year’s allowance to by this, and Thor grabs the little stone in his hands. He imagines it’s warmth when he presses it to his lips, and sticks it in the pocket of his sleep pants.





	brother, we fall

Loki is two, fat cheeked and frosting smeared, the first time he kisses Thor. He toddles up to his brother, solemn eyes but mischievously grinning and hands his older brother a clumsily wrapped package. Thor opens the messy paper and a small, green stone falls out. He picks it up curiously and looks at his brother. 

With all of the grace he can muster in his tiny body, Loki grabs Thor’s face between his chubby, sticky hands. He leans forward and kisses the tip of Thor’s nose with a slobbery smack, and then releases Thor’s face, giggling to himself.

There’s blue frosting smeared on his nose now, and Thor pockets a rock with no value, but something warm roots down deep in him as he watches his little brother waddle off to chase butterflies. 

\--

On his tenth birthday, Thor falls from a tree. In his defense, the tree was a lot taller from the top then it was the bottom, and despite his best efforts he can’t fly. But he lands with an audible thud against the wood-chip ground and he doesn’t cry, but he might whimper. 

His knee is bloody and his wrist hangs a little funny. Loki, five years old and trouble, sits at the top of the slide, watching his brother. He looks like he is waiting for a sign and as Thor’s lip begins to tremble, Loki nods to himself. He pushes down the metal tube and comes flying out the end.

Loki lands on his butt with a thump, but picks himself up easily. He stands above Thor, looking at the bloody mess of his knee and the purple bruise of his wrist. Carefully, more carefully then he is with anything, he leans down and grabs the torn edges of Thor’s jeans. He plants a small, feather-soft kiss to the mangled skin, then looks at Thor with a wide grin. “All better!” He announces and he hands Thor a piece of broken gravel.

Without a backward glance he saunters off to the swings.

\-- 

Loki has a thing for goodbye kisses at parties. He doesn’t like letting people out the door without his hands reaching out, without his tiny voice demanding, “Smacks!” 

Odin finds the entire thing a bit ridiculous, and Frigga adorable but distracting. 

Thor does his best to always indulge the tiny little runt he calls brother. He sweeps him into his arms as people begin to leave, after he’s pocketed a tiny silver pebble, and blows a raspberry into his pudgy belly. Loki bats his his face away, squealing. Demanding to be put down. 

“All wrong, dummy,” he says petulantly. 

“And how should I do it?” Thor asks. 

Loki grabs Thor’s face and his eyes, always shifting between blue and green, glimmer with seriousness. “Like this,” he leans forward until his lips are just brushing Thor’s, before blowing spit into Thor’s face.

He pulls back screeching as Thor digs his fingers into his side. 

“You little runt,” Thor snarls. Loki, slippery as ever, manages to weasel his way between Thor’s fingers and he takes off running to wherever he goes when he hides.

\--

Loki doesn’t kiss Thor when he turns thirteen. Loki refuses to even attend the party. He spends the whole time hiding away in his room, tinkering with whatever he plays with up there. 

It stings a little, but Thor makes the most of his nerf guns and water balloons and piles of cookies. 

He falters a little, when they light the candles on his cake, because he knows he won’t get the saliva-frosting smear across his face.

But he closes his eyes, and wishes real hard, and blows with all of his might. 

Later, hours after the household has gone to bed, Thor wakes up. He’s not sure why at first, until he hears the door creaking shut again. In the glow of the moon, he watches as Loki makes his way to the collection of pebbles and shiny stones on his dresser. His little brother adds something to the pile and looks around. 

Thor fakes being asleep. Loki tiptoes across the rug and presses his lips to Thor’s cheek. He lingers a moment, and then whispers, “Extra luck for thirteen,” before sneaking back out. 

Thor waits until he is sure his brother is gone before he sneaks over to his dresser. There, in middle of all the other pretty rocks is a tiny, teardrop shaped clear stone. It’s cut through with a reflective gold and a chalky black, and Thor remembers seeing it for $8.95 in one of those weird crystal shops. 

Loki must have saved up a year’s allowance to buy this, and Thor grabs the little stone in his hands. He imagines it’s warmth when he presses it to his lips, and sticks it in the pocket of his sleep pants. 

\--

Thor gets into Big Trouble two days before he turns fifteen, and his parents cancel his party. He thinks it’s entirely unfair, and they remind him they have to  _ replace an entire building, _ thanks to his lightning experiment. 

It is still his birthday though, so they take him to the DMV and he frowns in his permit photo and the four of them share a large meaty pizza. It’s a small celebration, made cozy by the candles on the tables and the banana split they share between them. 

By the end, Thor’s belly is full to the point of splitting and his cheeks hurt from laughing as Loki manages to spit straws at everyone without getting caught. 

Frigga finally puts a stop to Loki’s wrapper blowing when a kid gets in trouble with his mom for it. Thor’s brother has pizza sauce on one corner of his mouth, and chocolate sauce on the other, and something hot screams in Thor’s gut. 

He waits until they’re in the backseat of the land rover to runs his thumbs over the corner. Loki beams at him, like he knew the mess was there, like he was waiting. 

“So?” Thor demands.

Loki reaches in his pocket and hands Thor what looks like a piece of chipped brick, covered in soot. He leans back in his seat, waiting, as Thor turns it over in his hands. 

“It’s a piece of the science lab?” Thor asks. Loki just shrugs, blue eyes flickering green, and he kisses Thor’s cheek. 

\--

Thor turns 18 on a Monday that feels just like any other day. It’s been a tough year for Loki, who swears  _ he _ isn’t the problem. “It’s just the curse of 13,” he crows. 

Thor tells his parents he doesn’t want a party and he doesn’t want a dinner. He just wants to be left alone to work on college applications. 

He hasn’t admitted to anyone he already knows where he’s going; the University that’s two hours from home. 

He knows he could go most anywhere, but he doesn’t want to leave. 

That night, he lays awake until the sun has almost risen again, but Loki never slinks his way in. When Thor wakes up at noon, there’s no extra rock on his dresser. Instead, there’s a boulder of hurt at the base of his spine. 

\--

Thor thought two hours was close enough, but he doesn’t make it home much from school. The first birthday he walks back to his dorm and there are two candy kisses and a piece of obsidian on his pillow. 

None of his roommates knows how it got there, and when he calls his parents they swear Loki has been at home and class all day. Loki refuses to speak to Thor, spits the word “traitor” over the line. 

The second birthday, Loki is sitting on Thor’s bed in his apartment. He has a bruise taking up half his face he won’t explain and Thor sighs when he calls his parents to come get him. Loki shoves a broken marble into his palm, one that’s green and gold with silver streaks that look like a storm cutting through it. 

He kisses Thor’s cheek right before Odin knocks on the door and slinks to the car as their parents hug Thor.

\--

Thor is afraid of his 21st birthday. Not the fear of the bar crawls or birthday shots. Not even the fear of the looming end of his third year, the promise of his last on the horizon. 

It’s is because Odin calls him and says “perhaps your brother could spend this day with you, could stay there for a night. He has missed you terribly.”

When Thor left, Loki was 13. He was knobby knees and bony wrist and pasty skin. When he showed up on his bed last year, he was… less skinny and knobby, but still just as pale, and something wicked had fluttered in Thor. The same warm shame he’d felt at fifteen, wanting to lick marinara and chocolate off his brother’s face. The same warm affection he’d felt at thirteen, pocketing a stupid trinket-shop stone. 

But he tells his parents _yes_ , and _it’s_ _fortuitous his roommate is gone for the weekend._

Loki shows up just as Thor is arriving home from his last class. His timing has always been impeccable, and the shit eating grin tells Thor he doesn’t want to know how Loki knew when to arrive. 

But he leads his kid-brother into his loft and drops his bag by the couch. They stand there staring at the walls for a long moment, until Loki moves and reaches for Thor’s wrist. He tugs his brother’s palm open and drops a piece of blue painted granite into it.

Thor studies it, then his brother. “You really need to stop stealing bits of buildings, brother.”

Loki bristles visibly at the dismissal, but Thorn brushes past him and towards the bedroom. He’s got a shadow box hung on the wall, with several tiny little boxes. Fifteen of them hold a small piece of earth. There’s any empty square from year Loki gave him nothing, and one for the stone he keeps in his pocket. There are rows and and rows of empty pockets for all the years to come. 

Thor lifts the glass and tucks the chip of the University Library into its slot. 

When he turns, Loki is standing in the doorway, looking less than confident for the first time Thor can remember. 

“You’ve kept them all?” Loki breaths out. Like Thor could ever throw away anything Loki have him. 

Loki shoves Thor to the side as he inspects the green and blue and red and dusty stones. His fingers hover over the the first empty square and his lips turn down sharp.

“I actually paid for that one,” Loki tells him. 

“I know,” Thor says, smug amusement heavy in his tone. 

Loki turns to him and crosses his arms. Thor’s surprised by the muscles he sees, corded and lean, beneath pale flesh. “You shouldn’t throw away luck, brother. An oaf like you could always use a bit extra.” 

Thor’s fingers curl around the little trinket in his pocket, but he shrugs in the face of his brother.

“Are you hungry?” He asks. 

Loki’s eyes are sharp, starved, but Thor cannot feed  _ that  _ hunger.

Loki doesn’t challenge him in the moment, and Thorn takes him to a greasy little hole in the wall off campus, known for it’s chicken and cheesecakes. 

\--

Thor distracts Loki for as long as he can, but Loki remains unimpressed with this place that stole his brother away. He tugs insistently on Thor’s fingers, never letting go of his hand. 

They get back to the apartment, and Thor immediately wants to leave again. Loki still owes him a kiss, but it feels like a threat this time. 

It was easy to brush away frosting snacks and slobber licks and marinara kisses. Easy to unwrapped pink-foil chocolate and pretend it meant nothing. 

But Loki is no longer the mischievous kid earning cooed “aws” from the adults around him. 

He’s still growing into his limbs, but already Thor can see the sharp edges he’ll wear like armor. Dark hair carefully brushed back and eyes that fluctuate between blue and green, pouty pink lips always curved into a half smirk, Thor shudders at the vision his brother has become, is still becoming. 

Loki notices, and raises a brow. “Cold, brother?”

Thor shakes his head but Loki is already moving, is already pressing himself against Thor. For a moment, as Thor’s hands tighten around cut-glass hips, he can imagine this is normal, that Loki is little and still stumbling around, and Thor’s just helping balance him. 

But then lips brushes against his own, soft as kitten fur, dry and warm. Loki presses hard, digs his fingers into Thor’s forearms. He angles his head and, when Thor doesn’t immediately respond, dares lick his way into Thor’s stone-stiff mouth. 

The first taste of his little brother, salty and musky, undoes Thor. He picks Loki up by the waist, wraps lithely muscled legs around his own, and walks them into the bedroom that way. 

They fall onto the bed, fall out of their shirts and their shoes and their jeans and their briefs. 

For one horribly clear moment, Thor leans up on his elbows and looks into the eyes of the child beneath him, the one he calls brother. And Loki looks up at him with a flushed chest but determined eyes and Thor knows,  _ god but he knows, _ if he leans down, if he fumbles against his brother this way, there will be no return. 

Loki grabs his shoulders, shifts his hips so that his erection brushes against Thor’s thigh.

Dammit, but Thor falls to a sound track of thunder, to a lightning display that would make the gods jealous. 

He makes quick work of opening Loki up, of licking into him, digging his fingers into secret places. Loki keens and mewls beneath him, twist and arches and writhes. He comes so completely undone Thor feels he’ll never be able to put him back together. 

Loki comes first, body unused to so much exposure, to so much sensation, and Thor follows him with his own cry.

They fall asleep, sticky and spent and curled together. 

\--

Loki turns 18 on a Tuesday. He wakes up in his brother’s new home, on a mattress far too big for two people. The bed beside him is cold, and he aches with disappointment.

Until he notices the gold wrapped package on the empty pillow. He opens it, and a small chocolate kiss falls out, along with a tiny little emerald he almost losses in the sheets. 

Loki abandons the chocolate, carefully plucking the little gem between his fingers as he tries to find his brother. 

Thor’s in the kitchen, burning toast. When he notices Loki he grins bright and stupid and kisses his cheek, stubble scraping against Loki’s smooth jaw. 

“What’s this?” Loki demands. 

“An emerald,” Thor says like it’s obvious. 

“Why?” Loki asks. 

Thorn turns to him, amusement brimming in his blue eyes. “The first stone you ever gave me was shiny and green. I thought the stone I asked you to marry me with should match.”

Loki’s eyes prickle, but he refuses to be the weeping fiancé. “You dumb oaf, there’s supposed to be a band holding the stone!”

Thor shrugs and wraps his arms around Loki’s waist, pulling him in close. “So you’ll help me pick one out then.”

There’s the roast for lunch burning behind them and the sun filtering in the curtains and an emerald that bounces along the wooden floor they’ll struggle to find later. 

But Thor leans down and kisses Loki, and whispers “Happy Birthday, Precious One,” and the world falls into place.   
  



End file.
